Work to start on county plan for waste without a landfill

It is taking longer than expected to get started, but a re-write of the county’s solid waste plan will soon be underway, said Lenawee County Administrator Martin Marshall.

“We expect to do that shortly,” Marshall said Wednesday.

There is still one vacant seat on a 14-member committee that is to work on a solid waste plan made obsolete by the closure of the Adrian Landfill in September. Others were appointed in December. Marshall said he has a candidate for a second seat reserved for an environmental group representative. The committee, however, could begin meeting before that appointment can be made by the county commission on Feb. 12.

An overhaul of the county’s solid waste plan was called for last summer before Republic Services Inc. announced the closing of the only landfill in Lenawee County. An update was requested to settle a debate over charging a fee on trash hauled to landfills outside the county and whether landfill tipping fee revenue should be used to subsidize local government recycling programs.

The county’s solid waste program has been funded by a fee of more than $1 per ton charged for trash taken to the Adrian Landfill. The fee brought in an average of more than $10,000 a month.

Potential sources to replace that revenue will be on the agenda for an updated plan. Another issue will be acquiring written agreements with other counties to continue accepting trash that is now exported from Lenawee County, said Marshall.

“Their initial responsibility will be to address the lack of an in-county landfill in the solid waste plan,” he said. “We are required to have an overall plan to ensure the county can meet its solid waste needs.”

“The charge of the committee will be to come up with alternatives for disposing of solid waste in the absence of a landfill,” said Grant Bauman, the Region II Planning Commission’s principal planner. He was appointed as a member of Lenawee County’s solid waste management planning committee and will provide research and staff support to the committee.

“I’m sure we’ll be looking at what the alternatives are in the existing plan,” Bauman said. The committee will also be figuring out what makes the best economic sense, he said.

Most of the trash collected in Lenawee County is now being trucked to landfills in Wayne County and to Williams County in Ohio, said Marshall.

Working out agreements with other counties for commitments to accept Lenawee County’s trash will be more difficult, Marshall said, without an operating landfill here to use as an exchange.

Bauman said the issue of revenue to fund county recycling and solid waste programs will also be complicated. All options will be open for discussion, he said.

Lenawee County is continuing to operate a recycling collection facility in Adrian that was opened in November 2012. Marshall reported in December that the solid waste department had $162,000 in reserve funds that could continue the recycling program for two or three years.

The process of amending the county’s solid waste plan will take at least a full year, said Christina Miller of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s Office of Waste Management & Radiological Protection.

After a committee drafts a plan and goes through a public comment period and public hearing, she said, approval is needed by the county commission, two-thirds of the local governments in the county and by the DEQ.